Church of the Churchless

Swarm theory supports spiritual independence

What makes a bee hive, an ant colony, a school of fish, or the stock market so adaptive? These swarms of individuals manage to do the right thing most of the time, yet they're leaderless.

There's a lesson here. Independence leads to wiser collective decisions. Top-down control, the modus operandi of almost every religious organization, is maladaptive.

A fascinating National Geographic article, "Swarm Theory," says:

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

It's interesting that selflessness, losing the ego, being a part of something bigger than yourself, becoming a drop in the spiritual ocean, is an almost universal religious theme.

Devotees often dress alike, think alike, act alike, feel alike. They engage in seemingly ant-like behavior, as I wrote about in "Sand, servitude, and satguru." The usual belief is that submission to a higher authority is the way to become a part of the whole (or Whole) rather than just a part.

Yet living entities that are truly part of a collective, a swarm, don't act that way at all. Independent individual decisions each contribute to adaptive group behavior.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize.

Thomas Seeley is a biologist at Cornell University who studies bee decision-making. These "dumb" creatures turn out to be smarter than a lot of human organizations. The bee rules are: (1) Seek a diversity of options, (2) Encourage a free competition among ideas, and (3) Use an effective mechanism to narrow choices.

This is pretty much the scientific method. It's also much closer to how effective businesses are managed today than the traditional "I'm the boss" approach.

Even when I was a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) true believer, my scientific outlook on spirituality led me to question some central tenets of this mystic-religious faith.

One of which was: Spiritual experiences can't ever be disclosed. This supposedly was to prevent the ego-expansion that would occur if a disciple were to let out "I saw God today" and started being revered by other disciples.

However, it also had the convenient effect (for the organization) of preventing disciples from comparing notes and arriving at a collective decision about whether the meditative and other practices enjoined by RSSB produced the desired results.

An ant colony or bee hive couldn't last for very long under this sort of injunction. If all the bees believed, "I just found some juicy flowers, but I can't tell anyone," the hive's food supply would rapidly dwindle. It's by each foraging bee independently communicating what's been found that a collective intelligence forms.

This goes a long way toward explaining the rigidity of fundamentalist religious organizations. Their top-down decision making, in which all of the authority is vested in the top levels of a hierarchy, who themselves are guided by strict dogma and hidebound holy texts, prevents the group from evolving to be in more of an accord with reality.

Religions are good at doing the same old thing. Preaching to the faithful, proselytizing, maintaining firm boundaries between Us and Them. Mechanical production lines are similarly good at churning out the same product.

But if situations change, or if the product turns out to need improving, that's when independence becomes a huge asset.

In fact, almost any group that follows the bees' rules will make itself smarter, says James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. "The analogy is really quite powerful. The bees are predicting which nest site will be best, and humans can do the same thing, even in the face of exceptionally complex decisions."

Investors in the stock market, scientists on a research project, even kids at a county fair guessing the number of beans in a jar can be smart groups, he says, if their members are diverse, independent minded, and use a mechanism such as voting, auctioning, or averaging to reach a collective decision.

Not surprisingly, the article touts the Internet as a key way in which people can behave more like bees. Open information sharing leads to more intelligence.

This humble blog is an attempt to contribute to more informed choices in the religious arena. People's comments on my posts, and the comments on those comments, are very much like the waggling and dancing that bees do when they return to the hive.

"I experienced this. I went there. This is what I found." As truly-told information from many individuals is aggregated and spread among the hive, wiser decisions are made.

So every time someone honestly shares their take on some subject under discussion here, they're helping to produce a swarm intelligence.

That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do…no leadership is required.

…Think about a honeybee as she walks around inside the hive. If a cold wind hits the hive, she'll shiver to generate heat and, in the process, help to warm the nearby brood. She has no idea that hundreds of workers in other parts of the hive are doing the same thing at the same time to the benefit of the next generation.

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert.

…If you're looking for a role model in a world of complexity, you could do worse than to imitate a bee.

What’s wrong with me is wrong with religion

I had one of those oh, yeah! moments yesterday when everything became so clear to me. Now, I've had such moments before. In my "Mini-secret of universe revealed" I described a couple of them. One mescaline-fueled. One clear-headed.

So I'm not claiming that my most recent epiphany is It, the Big One, a foretaste of my impending satori. But hey, it could be.

And it's in line with my other revelations, though you might have to be under the influence of a psychedelic to appreciate my late '60s insight that it's all about a paper bag turned inside out.

I was running around yesterday like I often do. Lots on my to-do list. Feeling like I had more to accomplish than time to do it in. Home chores. Land use appeal chores. Exercising chores. Internet and email chores.

I'd be at the Marion County Planning Division office feeling like I should already be at Kinko's making copies of the documents I was picking up. Standing over a Kinko's copier I'd feel that it was past-time for me to be at the post office, if I was going to get this stuff mailed when it should be.

And so it'd go. Whatever I was doing didn't feel quite right. There was always a raspy buzz of dissatisfaction playing in the background of the music of every moment.

I wasn't unhappy. I never felt that I should have been doing something else. It wasn't my actions that were off kilter, because I was engaged in just what I wanted to do.

So what was creating that annoying buzz? Why wasn't I feeling absolutely fine? Where did that sensation of not-rightness come from?

Suddenly a truth hit me, seemingly obvious but not well recognized until that moment. I'd overlaid the actuality of my day with an imaginary idealized version of it.

Early on in the morning, when I was thinking about what I wanted to accomplish, I'd envisioned how things would ideally go. So much time for this. So much time for that. No wasted effort. Crisp clean efficient doing – exactly unlike how every day previous to that one had gone.

There's always surprises. I always get distracted. I always end up doing something different, or at least differently, than I expected.

Yet I still had a template of expectations that formed the backdrop of my day. When what was actually happening on the stage of my life didn't match up with the script that I'd laid out in my mind, that warning buzz of dissatisfaction would start up.

Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Reality had broken into my conception of what should be, and that was bothersome.

A lengthy back-up at the intersection that I usually flow right through that time of day. A normally reliable copier jamming. A phone call coming just when I was ready to leave. How could reality dare to deviate from the plan that I'd laid out for it!

That thought sounds crazy. And it is, really. Self-absorbed. Egotistical. Delusional. How could I expect that the world would revolve around my intentions for an entire day?

And yet…almost everyone engages in this same sort of insanity. Our myriad worries, anxieties, frettings, and fears almost entirely stem from the same source my buzz of dissatisfaction did: a perceived mismatch between an idealized template we've laid out for the events of life, and what really is happening, has happened, or we expect is going to happen.

Religions market their wares by playing on this same sense of wrongness. Without it, people would have little reason to buy any religious product.

You're sinful, so you need to be forgiven. You're heading for hell, so you need salvation. You're fallen from grace, so you need rising up. You're immersed in ignorance, so you need the truth. Need. A gap between what is and what should be. That's the void religion tries to fill.

But how real is that void? Which is to say, how real was my feeling during much of yesterday that whatever was happening at the moment needed improving upon?

Religions hold out to us the hope that one day – not now but in the future, just have faith and it'll come – all of the wrongness that we feel about life as it's being lived now will turn into a perfect sense of rightness. Bliss. Peace. Nirvana. Love. Oneness.

My big insight, though (and again, this is so obvious that most of us, including me, already know it; we just don't know how to handle our knowing), was that the perception of wrongness is what's wrong. With me, and with religion.

Yes, we should strive. We should try to accomplish things. We should learn more and love more. We should have goals. We should try to make both ourselves better people and the world a better place. All this is absolutely right.

But it's wrong to believe that whatever is happening is wrong, that an error message is flashing on the screen of the cosmos every time reality fails to conform to our expectation for it. That way lies madness. Or at least, anxiety, confusion, and divisiveness as competing groups (including religions) argue over This is the way it should be.

There's only what is. Period.

Admittedly, this includes the sense of wrongness that almost all of us feel much or most of the time. However, I don't believe that this purely human perception is an inherent aspect of really real reality.

It's an unnecessary anthropocentric add-on that creates a lot of grief, both individually and societally. If there's anything wrong with the world, it's that sense of wrongness. Without it, there'd be no need for religion. Or for all the other ways we try to reassure ourselves that one day It'll be all right.

"It" is just fine. It's our perception of It that's wrong.

Fifty proofs that God is imaginary

Ah, it feels great to have my faithlessness freshened.

Thanks to God is Imaginary, I've been able to browse through cleansing pools of skepticism – proofs (some more persuasive than others) that the Big Guy Upstairs is a figment of religious imagination.

The ones I looked at resonated with me. Proof #11 -Notice that there is no scientific evidence is something I've pondered a lot. It goes along with Proof #43 - Realize that a "hidden God" is impossible.

Impossible for a Christian-sort of religion that posits a personal divinity who's interested in us, at least. For if God wants to be known via miracles, incarnations, and whatnot, then it sure seems like there should be substantive signs of this being's interactions with the world.

In fact, there aren't any.

Prayers come in for especially strong mocking, earning the primo position: Proof #1 - Try praying. Over on a companion web site, Why Won't God Heal Amputees?, I perused the executive summary and noticed "the best optical delusion in the world!."

Yeah, it's good all right. And I've fallen for it myself more than once.

Nice site. I appreciated the Resources for Rational People – a fine compendium of web sites, blogs, books, videos, forums, and such. A cornucopia of non-dogmatism.

I return to church. And sit through a sermon.

Yesterday I went to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) equivalent of "church," a satsang. It'd been quite a while. I felt right at home, though no more so than at the Beanery Coffee House – our post satsang destination.

Old friends Ron and Rita had come down from Seattle for their almost annual visit. They enjoy the Salem Art Fair, even when I kid Ron about a leather cap making him look like one of the Village People.

Ron is a faithful RSSB devotee, though by no means a fundamentalist. Me, I'm whatever I am now. Some would say, a "deluded heretic." I prefer "open-minded skeptic."

Whatever, I enjoyed listening to Ron's discourse (e.g., sermon) to about fifteen members of the Salem sangat (congregation). I felt a little bit like Martin Luther going to Mass after nailing his theses to the door of the Castle Church. (Guess he didn't have a blog.)

Just a bit, though.

I'd always given rather heretical talks when I was a satsang speaker myself. So my churchless current state of mind wasn't all that different from my ostensible true believer days. I listened to Ron's 45 minute discourse with the same sort of attitude I had when satsang was a weekly habit.

Positive, yet questioning.

I agreed with one of Ron's main themes: We should lessen our ego, which manifests as a desire to have this happen rather than that. Trusting that what's going on in our lives is just fine exactly as it is, relax. Try to change what you can, if it seems to need changing, but don't sweat the small stuff. Which includes just about everything.

Question marks were emitted from my cranium, however, whenever I'd hear phrases like "We should be thankful to the Lord" and "God knows what is best for us."

References to a personalized divinity don't resonate with me anymore. The all pervading Tao or One seems plausibly possible to me, but not a Big Guy in the sky.

This is no criticism of my good buddy Ron, whose talk was about as non-dogmatically appealing to me as a RSSB "sermon" could be. It's just that I was newly struck, after my lengthy absence from satsang, at how much the RSSB teachings can sound like Christianity with all this talk of the Lord and God's grace.

What gives?

Back in 1971 I signed up for an Eastern philosophy, not Jesus-speak in Indian terms. Over the years I got accustomed to the guru who initiated me, Charan Singh, talking about the "Father." However, it always sounded incongruous to me, the result of trying to cram a formless monistic mysticism into a dualistic religious box.

Never wanting to pass up an opportunity to quote myself, I'm reminded of a favorite passage from a book I wrote about the Greek philosopher Plotinus, "Return to the One."

Normally love is considered to involve some sort of relationship. A relationship by definition consists of a connection that includes some and excludes others. If I am related to members of my family it means there are many other people in the world with whom I am not related. Having an intimate relationship with one person implies less than intimate relationships with others. There are shallow acquaintances and deep soul-mates.

It is easy then to project this sort of love onto the One. Some people believe they have a personal relationship with God. Thinking like Plotinus, we might ask them: "Does this mean that God is a person? Or does it mean that you are a person?" Perhaps it is possible for my relationship with the One to be markedly different from the One's relationship with me, because I am a minute part of creation and the One is the whole of creation.

There is no mention in the Enneads [Plotinus' writings] of a divine love that waxes and wanes or falls more upon some than others. It is our love that has these changeable and arbitrary qualities, not the One's love. For universal love is founded in absolute unity. When love, the lover, and the beloved are all the same entity, where is there room for any limit or duration?

Wow. I sure make a lot of sense to me.

Next time I go to church, it'll be inside my own head.

On getting rid of those little men in your TV set

Douglas Adams – author, humorist, and great admirer of science – was fond of telling a story about how televisions work. Here's how his friend, Richard Dawkins, related it in his "Lament for Douglas Adams" (Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 49).

A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen.

The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there?"

It's hard to give up religious fantasies. I know. I haven't been able to completely do this myself. I've got a couple of imaginary little men running around inside my psyche, holdovers from the true believer phase of my life when I hosted legions of them.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't worry too much when I find myself talking to a dead relative or deceased guru as if the person could actually hear me. Yet when I read Dawkins' piece today in "A Devil's Chaplain," Adams' story made me think.

When am I going to get rid of all of those little men? Why do I keep them around? Wouldn't there be more room for reality in my life if my imaginary friends weren't taking up valuable psychological real estate?

These are easy questions to ask. It isn't nearly so easy to find honest answers. Or to adjust the way I live my life to be more congruent with what I consider to be true.

I don't believe that little men are inside my TV set. Nor do I believe that their metaphysical equivalent are hard at work maintaining a spiritual side of the cosmos.

Yet when there are gaps in my understanding of what life is all about, including where I came from before birth and where I'm heading after death, it's tempting to fill those not-knowing voids with just a few little men.

A commenter on a Wired Science post about the Republican presidential candidates' take on evolution said this about the attempt of some candidates to meld creationism and evolution:

The problem with these answers, as paraphrased from Douglas Adams: "It's as if you were to show an ancient person a T.V., and they exclaim, 'Look at all the little men in there!', and then you teach them about electricity, photons, cathode ray tubes, etc, and they say 'Oh, alright, I understand how a T.V. works now, really I do... But don't you think there might be just a few little men in there?'"

These half measures between creationism and evolution are displays of ignorance, and are philosophically undefendable. They make less sense than either of the two ideas on their own, and in the case of creationism, that's really saying something.

If you're going to believe in little men inside your TV set, maybe it's better to have the television filled to the brim with them than to have it thinly populated. A little bit of religion could indeed be more ridiculous than a lot.

Balanced between belief and doubt

I enjoyed my 45 minute or so BlogTalkRadio conversation with medium Marcel Cairo yesterday. We were supposed to talk about Science, Spirituality, and Spinoza, which we sort of did.

The archived AfterLifeFM show is here. To hear me in my (somewhat muffled) glory, scroll down and click on one of the symbols to the right of "Dismantling Dogma." The arrow thingie fires up Windows Media Player.

Alternatively, I'll share my memory of some conversational highlights.

This is the third time Marcel and I have talked over the Internet. We've got a thing going. As a medium, Marcel obviously believes in the afterlife. Me, I'd like it a lot if I will live on after my physical death. Who wouldn't, so long as it isn't in a hellish state?

But I don't know if I will. So I float in the unknowing zone between belief and doubt, wanting to be open to the possibility of existence beyond the physical, yet having no proof that this is a reality rather than wishful thinking. To me, this is the most honest and practical way of living my life:

Accepting that until I know something, I don't know it.

So I told Marcel that every morning I spend some time meditating. My habitual pitch to the "universe" (my way of referring to the totality of what's real) goes something like this.

Hi, it's me, Brian. If there's anyone or anything hearing me, other than myself, I'd be pleased to get to know you. I have no idea who or what you may be. Jesus, Buddha-nature, Allah, Jehovah, angel, extra-terrestrial intelligence, God, Zeus, guru…I'm clueless. And ready to be surprised. Like Jodie Foster said as she was waiting to be transported somewhere, anywhere, by a mysterious force in Contact, "It's a go!"

I don't know which direction to go myself. Yesterday I said that the best I could do is surmise that ultimate reality is much more likely to be found within rather than without. Spinoza makes scientific sense when he says that there is only One Thing happening in the cosmos.

He called it God, or Nature, or Being. Three words for the same thing that can't be encapsulated by words. It's everywhere and everything. We're all a part of it. Or perhaps more accurately, we are it. Thus to look for this truth outside ourselves is to miss where it could be found.

I mentioned that it's strange (or maybe not so strange) that if there's a reality beyond the physical, it's so damn difficult to discern. You'd think that the foundation of the cosmos would be just a touch more evident. However, scientists can't put their finger on a Theory of Everything either, despite a tremendous amount of trying.

This leads me to the conclusion that a soft touch is better than a crude reaching out. My meditation now is essentially an effort to stay on a pivot point that allows me to turn in any direction. Belief. Disbelief. Faith. Doubt. Higher. Lower. East. West. Death. Life.

Last night Laurel and I had our second Night Club Two-Step class. Like Tango, the man is supposed to be the leader 100% of the time. At one point Lora, our instructor, went over to the sound system and brandished a remote control.

"See this, guys?" she said. "This is yours in dance. You get to decide the moves. Use it!" That's a challenge. An equal challenge, for the women, is to not anticipate what the lead is going to be.

Laurel and I would get into practicing a series of moves, a pattern. After a while I could feel her edging ahead of me, taking a step before I'd led it because she thought she knew what I was going to do.

Bad girl! Laurel was admonished for this when Lora took on the man's role while demonstrating a move with my wife. Lora stopped Laurel in her tracks and said, "What are you doing? I didn't lead that step."

Applying this lesson to dancing with the entire universe rather than an individual person, Spinoza taught that everything that happens is necessary. It's determined. There's nothing outside of Nature, or God, that could exercise an influence on the universe.

Thus you could say (and Spinoza does) that God/Nature always does the leading, and we the following. Einstein agreed, holding that free will is an illusion. He echoed Spinoza's view that we are aware of what we desire to do, but unaware of the causes that lead us to have that desire.

So it makes sense to strive to be a good follower, sensitively attuned to the forces acting upon us both from within and without (understanding that if the universe is indeed a unity, actually there's no without).

We become lighter on our feet, trusting that we're in the arms of a partner – God/Nature/Being, to use Spinoza's terms – that will lead us truly. Our faith is that we'll be led to do, think, feel, and perceive the right thing, even though it isn't possible for us to know ahead of time what that will be.

Such is the balance that a dancer who's a good follower has.

She returns to her center after a move is led, not anticipating what will happen next, ready for anything, sensitive to the lead that may be felt either subtly or overtly.

She floats in an zone between faith and doubt – confident that she will be led appropriately, but not knowing where or how.

Know the strength of man,
But keep a woman's care!
Be the stream of the universe!
Being the stream of the universe,
Ever true and unswerving,
Become as a little child once more.

…Know honor,
Yet keep humility.
Be the valley of the universe!
Being the valley of the universe,
Ever true and resourceful,
Return to the state of the uncarved block.

--Tao Te Ching, chapter 28

(Here's another version of those verses, with some nice commentary.)

Me talk Spinoza on BlogTalkRadio today

Who knew there was such a thing as BlogTalkRadio? Not me, until medium Marcel Cairo invited me to be on his AfterLifeFM show today, 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM Eastern, some other time in between the coasts.

Tune in. Or better yet, call in. You listen via the Internet by pressing the "Click here" thingie when the time comes. You can call in via any sort of phone: 646-478-5711.

Our subject is Dismantling Dogma: Science, Spirituality, and Spinoza. I'm no expert on Spinoza, but I've filled up a large-post it note with pithy reminders of his philosophy, which should be good enough for a BlogTalkRadio show. (I'm guessing, and hoping, that no Spinoza experts will be listening).

Marcel bills his show as featuring "smart talk from both sides of the grave." Hopefully my side of the conversation will be from the alive side. If not, this should be a really interesting afternoon for me.

Morality has nothing to do with religion

Thanks to Middle Earth Journal, I learned about an exchange between Michael Gerson and Christopher Hitchens concerning whether religion is necessary for people to act morally.

Gerson started it off with his "What atheists can't answer." With a title like that he should have known that an answer would be forthcoming. In fact, it took Hitchens just a day to come back with "An Atheist Responds."

Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, is a tough guy to argue with. In this case, though, a middle school debate team could have handled Gerson with one argumentative hand tied behind their collective back. That's how lame Gerson's feeble attempt to link religiosity with morality was. He ended with:

Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of "liberation" is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

I've re-read these paragraphs several times. I still can't figure out what Gerson is talking about. He grants that people are innately moral. But then he says that if our capacity for morality is natural, rather than God-given, somehow human existence becomes meaningless.

As I pointed out in my "Morality comes from nature, not God" post, there's nothing chancy about evolution. So to say that our desire to be moral is a "cruel joke" – that's what's funny. Gerson seems to want to impose his theological fantasies on reality, anthropomorphically arguing that something is wrong with nature because everything and everyone dies: people, planets, suns.

Hitchens, on the other hand, gets morality right. This is my favorite part of his atheist's response.

Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first -- I have been asking it for some time -- awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.

Today I finished up painting some supports that were added to our carport to better assure that it remains standing after the Big One (earthquake) that will hit the Pacific Northwest someday. Which points to one reason not to believe in God.

I haven't spent one nanosecond praying to tectonic plates to spare us from devastation. There wouldn't be any point. They're going to do what they have to do. But if I believed that God was in charge of everything that happens here on Earth, I'd be seriously pissed with the dude if He allowed an earthquake to trash our house.

Why, my Internet connection could be lost for weeks. That really would make life meaningless.

But I digress. My mean reason for bringing up the carport was to relate my frame of mind as I went from post to post with my paint can and brush. I enjoyed the work, aside from a few awkward moments balancing on a shifting woodpile while trying to get to a just-out-of-reach board.

I knew that my wife was going to like the new look of the carport. So would anyone else who lived in our house (we're planning to live here for many more years, but, hey, you never know what the future will bring). I put more care into my painting than the job really required, because I had a feeling that the work I was doing could easily live on after me.

So I wasn't doing it just for myself and my wife. Back in my devotional days I would have dedicated this seva (service) to my guru, or to God. However, today I simply painted with the same quasi-selfless attitude of "not for me, but for thee." The only difference is that I didn't personalize or particularize "thee."

I just painted the best I could. When I'd finished with the supports I decided to paint a white electrical cord brown that interfered with the feng shui of our earth-toned carport. I could have finished with the cord hanging from the rafters more quickly if I hadn't painted both sides of it – including the top that's only visible to bats (and they can't see, right?)

How would believing in God or a divine being have made a difference to what I was doing? My actions, thoughts, and feelings would've been the same regardless. People who want to do good will act morally whether they're religious or not.

Their religiosity just becomes an extraneous add-on, a God-made-me-do-it explanation that sounds righteous but is totally unnecessary.

Like Hitchens said, there isn't any ethical action that could be done by a believer, but not an unbeliever.

Skepticism is the fruit of knowledge

James Randi is a magician. He knows the tricks. What's different about Randi is that he openly exposes the magic game, as I read in a recent AP story about him.

He gave up performing as The Amazing Randi years ago, but his words to the audience at the end of each show foreshadowed his next act.

''Everything you have seen here is tricks,'' he would say. ''There is nothing supernatural involved here.''

Randi now dedicates himself to exposing frauds. His web site features a million dollar paranormal challenge to anyone who can demonstrate "super" powers in a controlled setting.

So far nobody has come close to winning the money. No one has even passed the preliminary tests. Not surprising. In the metaphysical arena, talk triumphs over action.

When you say, "show me the proof" (of God, miracles, higher dimensions of reality, whatever) there's no response. Just more talk about why there can't be a response (such as, "I'm not allowed to show my powers to unworthy or skeptical eyes").

Reading the story about Randi got me to thinking about how the more you know about something, the better able you are to see the flaws in it – and to burst the unquestioning belief bubble of the mildly well-informed.

After about nine years of studying traditional Shotokan karate I got disenchanted with this martial art. Some essays by Rob Redmond that I found online helped me make the break to a style that was better suited for me. He said:

If you can't find fault with Shotokan, then you haven't given it much thought. In fact, to me, it is axiomatic that if someone is a true expert at something, they will have many complaints and criticisms of the way things are in their field of expertise.

The more I learn about Shotokan, the less I like it. Every year that passes helps me to find new things that I am disappointed in. The more I progress, the more limitations of Shotokan become apparent to me. If you cannot see the inherent weaknesses and holes in whatever you are studying, you don't know much about it.

After more than thirty years of practicing the meditation, dietary, worship, and other disciplines of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, I was highly knowledgeable about this mystic philosophy.

Heck, I'd even written a "holy book" that was published by RSSB. And written another than was distributed by the organization. Plus, I was on the edge of having still another published by RSSB before they and I parted writing ways.

So I understand how a believer turns into a skeptic. It's almost a given, as Redmond says, if you keep your eyes open to what you've being exposed to, rather than turning a blind eye to anomalies.

Perfection only exists when you don't look too closely at something or someone. Once the details are seen for what they are, flaws become evident. That's reality. We live in an imperfect world. "Perfect" is just a word, a concept, an ideal divorced from the real.

Don't worry if you've been a true believer and are now starting to have doubts.

This is a sign of progress, not of backsliding. It shows that you know enough to understand what your belief system doesn't know. Or at least, can't prove that it knows (which, really, is the same thing – unless you value gullibility).

Ridiculing my own religious fundamentalism

Recently I made fun of keeping kosher – including the absurd practice of getting around a prohibition of lighting a fire on the Sabbath by starting an oven ahead of time and disabling its light bulb.

Some commenters gave me heat for ridiculing this practice of observant Jews, even though I was careful to point out that I wasn't singling out Judaism. Every fundamentalist religious practice deserves to be laughed at.

I replied to one comment with:

Like I said, I'm an equal opportunity ridiculer. I particularly enjoy ridiculing my own previous unsupported beliefs.

So now let's have some laughs at my expense. Here's a partial list of what I used to hold near and dear when I was an unquestioning Radha Soami Satsang Beas true believer. This is part of the RSSB version of "keeping kosher."

-- Initiated disciples (satsangis) were supposed to meditate 2 ½ hours a day. I'd set a timer on my watch. Before midnight I'd make sure that it registered 150 minutes of meditation time. Sometimes I'd stare at the seconds going by until I could hit the stop button after the magic 150^th minute passed. Not exactly deep concentrated meditation, but I was precisely obeying the letter of the RSSB law, which gave me great fundamentalist satisfaction.

--Like most other satsangis, I believed that food blessed by the guru was really special. I'd treasure little bags of blessed puffed rice or granulated sugar that initiates would bring back from India to share. I'd string out the supposed spiritual benefit of consuming this parshad by eating a teeny bit every morning before I meditated. If any spilled, I'd eat it off the floor, along with any dust or dirt it might have attracted. After all, it was holy!

--Eggs weren't permitted to be eaten on the RSSB vegetarian diet. Even non-fertilized eggs, since these were still considered to be potential instruments of conveying life. So buying new items in a grocery store went slowly. I'd read every ingredient to make sure there weren't any eggs in the product. When I got older and couldn't see as well, I'd pass an item up if the fine print was illegible. For if I ate a smidgen of egg white, I'd have sinned!

--At first there was no problem with cheese. But then my guru died, and his successor decided that animal rennet was a no-no. Satsangis put great effort into researching cheese brands to distinguish those that were theologically pure from those that weren't. Great fun (not!) for hapless waiters who'd be asked by an initiate, "Your pizza looks good. But before I order could you check and see whether the cheese on it has animal rennet?" (What the !@#$% ? would be the evident reaction, but we didn't care, because even a speck of "non-kosher" cheese could ruin your good karma. How'd we know? The guru said so.)

--I followed the RSSB injunction against drinking alcohol for more than thirty years. With a single lapse at my 10-year high school reunion that was just too freaking weird to get through completely sober. As I wrote about before, I felt morally superior to anyone who'd I see having a drink, especially a "lapsed" satsangi. So rigid spiritual practice doesn't lead to humility – I can testify to that.

Fortunately, my second wife (who I married in 1990) wasn't a RSSB initiate. Almost from the moment we met Laurel would kid me about how seriously I took my sacred satsangi vows.

She could do a damn fine Saturday Night Live "Church Lady" imitation. "You're doomed, Brian, doomed, if you eat an egg white!" Laurel would intone. "You're going straight to hell if your lips touch that piece of cake!"

This could get mildly irritating at times. But looking back, I'm grateful that Laurel wasn't shy about making gentle fun of me. Over the years her kidding began to sound more like wisdom than ridicule. She helped open my eyes to the unthinking dogmatism with which I held certain beliefs.

Right now I'm sipping a glass of red wine as I sit on our deck, enjoying a warm summer evening in the company of some beautiful Oregon countryside, a wi-fi laptop, and my current churchless sentiments.

I can smile at what I once believed without regretting having held those beliefs so firmly. Like the cliché says, It's all good.

Yet also worthy of ridicule, if some of that "all" is ridiculous.

My oven’s “Sabbath Feature” shows idiocy of keeping kosher

Before making fun of keeping kosher, I want to assure any observant Jew who comes across this blog post that I'm an equal opportunity religion-basher.

So you're not being singled out because you're Jewish. It's your religious fundamentalism, which comes in many denominational varieties, that's deserving of some ridicule today.

Which happens to be July 10. The temperature has hit an unusual 100 degrees here in Oregon. So there's good reason to keep the oven off today.

However, not turning our Frigidaire electric wall oven on during the Jewish Sabbath (basically, Friday night to Saturday night) – that's kosher nonsense.

When we bought the oven in the course of kitchen remodeling, I noted that the manual referred to a Sabbath Feature "for use on the Jewish Sabbath & Holidays." Intrigued, I headed over to a URL mentioned in the manual, http://www.star-k.org/. There I entered the weird and wacky world of keeping kosher, something I knew very little about.

I still don't. Not surprising, since a few minutes of browsing around this web site doesn't begin to unravel the intricate details of one of the most bizarre forms of religious ritualism.

Jewish law prohibits all sorts of activities on the Sabbath. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article that pertains to our oven's Sabbath Feature:

Another example is the prohibition (according to Orthodox and some Conservative rabbinic authorities) against turning electric devices on or off, which is derived from one of the "39 categories of work (melachot)". However, the authorities are not in agreement about exactly which category (or categories) this would fall under.

One view is that tiny sparks are created in a switch when the circuit is closed, and this would constitute "lighting a fire" (category 37). If the appliance is one whose purpose is for light or heat (such as an incandescent lightbulb or electric oven) then the lighting or heating elements may be considered as a type of fire; if so, then turning them on constitutes both "lighting a fire" (category 37) and "cooking" (a form of baking, category 11), and turning them off would be "extinguishing a fire" (category 36).

Another view is that a device which is plugged into an electrical outlet of a wall becomes part of the building, but is nonfunctional while the switch is off; turning it on would then constitute "building" and turning it off would be "demolishing" (categories 35 and 34).

Some schools of thought consider the use of electricity to be forbidden only by rabbinic injunction, rather than because it violates of one of the original categories. A common solution to the problem of electricity involves pre-set timers for electric appliances, to turn them on and off automatically, with no human intervention on Shabbat itself.

Good god! I've believed in some strange spiritual stuff, but not this strange.

A fellow blogger, John, has pretty much the same attitude toward not turning an oven on during the Sabbath as I do. And he offers some insights into the rationale for keeping kosher.

Which basically is that there isn't any reasonable reason for the injunctions. It's a matter of fundamentalist obedience to religious doctrines that make no sense.

You probably have to be a rabbi to fully understand an oven's Sabbath Mode. I did my best to warm up to the Star-K Online discussion on this subject, but my brain got fried pretty quickly.

Apparently it's OK to start cooking before the Sabbath, and it's also OK to open the oven door and take food out on the Sabbath, but it's not OK if an oven light goes on when the door is opened, so make sure it's unscrewed (on our oven, the light stays on the whole time the Sabbath feature is active; that keeps kosher, but also contributes a mite to global warming, so you're going to incur the wrath of Al Gore).

Reading some other pages on the web site, including Kosher 101, I kept having to remind myself that this wasn't a satire. I mean, who comes up with this stuff?

1. Equipment used to manufacture products containing non-kosher ingredients may acquire non-kosher status. Thus, production that takes place after non-kosher production is completed can be rendered non-kosher by virtue of the equipment used, even if the ingredients are kosher.

2. Non-kosher equipment can be restored to a kosher mode by a variety of ways, usually depending upon the way in which the non-kosher product was produced. This process is referred to as Kosherization. Usage of a non-kosher product in conjunction with liquid, e.g. a non-kosher soup, requires treating the kettle with boiling water to restore its kosher status. Non-kosher products that were produced where there is no liquid cooking medium, i.e. an oven band, require a different technique. This equipment must be treated by high heat in order to restore its kosher status.

Kosherization seems to be a way of dealing with Jewish cooties. Like "real" cooties, they're unseen but highly contagious. I remember getting them all the time in elementary school, mostly when a girl touched me (ugh!).

But come on, observant Jews of the world. There comes a time to grow up and lose the fear of cooties. Live dangerously. Try using your oven on Saturday without the aid of its Sabbath Feature.

There are, though, a few fundamentalist Jewish rules that I could get behind. Like the encouragement to have sex on Shabbat, particularly on Friday night.

Now we're making sense.

Sheer absence of soul reveals its nature

Ah, sheer poetry. About the soul. Featured on the front page of The Oregonian Living section yesterday, of all things. I've poeticized a quote from Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds 3 exhibit that I wrote about recently.

In the exhibition
the pure absence of the soul
actually
underlines the soul

The longer I am
an anatomist,
the closer I am
to the soul

just
because of
its sheer
absence

I was surprised by the tone of the story, headlined "Exhibit or exhibitionism?" The reporter, Nancy Haught, must have gone out of her way to find people who were offended by this display of plastinated human bodies (plus a camel).

All of the people who donated their bodies did so voluntarily. Yet the story had numerous quotes along the lines of this ridiculous observation from a Unitarian minister (I'd expect a Unitarian to be a lot more open-minded).

People volunteer for all sorts of things. People volunteer to be prostitutes. People volunteer for genital mutilation, to kill themselves. That doesn't mean society should cooperate with their wishes.

My take is that underlying this sort of how could they?! reaction to the exhibit is the commonly held assumption among religious types that the soul, if not itself physical, still is closely linked to the body.

Why else would so much valuable real estate be taken up by graves? This is a great income producer for casket makers and embalmers, but theologically is absurd.

When the body is dead, it's a goner. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Finito.

If there's anything of us that survives death, it sure isn't material. There's no evidence of anyone being resurrected, notwithstanding the blind faith of Christian true believers (and members of other religions with similar supernatural dogmas).

So if you want to hang on to a belief in something spiritual – call it "soul" – that lives on after we die, any sort of physical evidence of it belies the belief.

When it comes to the soul, nothing trumps something.

That's why I liked von Hagens' statement so much. It's deeply profound, though I doubt most Oregonian readers appreciated it sufficiently, being a bump in the road on their dash through the Living section to the comics.

Spiritual emptiness: it's a good thing. The very best.

I don't know if the soul exists. But if it does, I'm pretty sure it won't be found in any familiar place. Like, the body. Or thoughts. Or feelings. Or perceptions.

It'll be hanging out where the really wild things roam.

Nothingness. Which, if you believe physicists and mystics, is a close kin to Everything.

Religions aren’t alike. I think I know why.

It's (churchless) confession time. I'm getting down on my bloggish knees and admitting to a mea culpa. Not a very juicy one, though. It's philosophical rather than salacious.

For a long time I've been an advocate of the notion that under their dogmatic skins religions share a common skeleton. Aldous Huxley called this the Perennial Philosophy and wrote a book by that name.

But now I've come to agree with Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University's Department of Religion, who said in Newsweek recently that the proposition "The Major Religions are Essentially Alike" is false.

Religious people do agree that there is something wrong with this world. But they disagree as soon as they start to diagnose the problem, and diverge even more when it comes to prescriptions for the cure. Christians see sin as the human problem and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in this tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem and liberation from suffering (nirvana) as the goal. If practitioners of the world's religions are all climbing a mountain, then they are ascending very different peaks and using very different tools.

On the other hand, I've quoted this passage by Huxley many times. It used to make sense to me. Now it doesn't.

The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being – the thing is immemorial and universal.

Well, those words sound warm and fuzzy. I can almost picture the founders of the world religions sitting around a campfire and singing Kum-Bai-Ya.

But the reality is that once you get beyond the broadest generalizations of which Huxley speaks – there's something more than physical reality, and we can know it – religious beliefs have precious little in common. Prothero urges us to recognize this, rather than paper over the differences.

Coming at the problem of religion from the angle of difference rather than similarity is scary. But the world is what it is. And both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

I have no problem respecting someone's belief, so long as they admit that this is all it is: a belief, not truth. Where I went wrong in my Perennial Philosophy phase was not recognizing this: accepting that some people have been able to actually know the truth about divine reality and go beyond belief is itself a belief.

Huxley simply takes this as a given. He says that most people who spout off about spirituality and religion are merely echoing what others have written (who in turn probably have done the same thing). Yet he claims that there have been first hand exponents of the Perennial Philosophy who have been given the name of saint, prophet, sage, or enlightened one.

That's true enough – that they've been given those names. But what proof is there that these supposed first-handers aren't also passing on secondhand inspiration that may never have been grounded in any direct perception of a higher reality?

A present day guru, Gurinder Singh, is fond of saying, "How do you know I'm not a fraud? How do you know I just don't have the gift of gab?"

Indeed. How? There's no answer to that question, not in any scientifically demonstrable sense at least. If there was any solid proof that one religion knew the really real truth about divine reality, it would have risen to the top of the religious pyramid – just as scientific theories do.

Instead, what we have, after 10,000 years or more of intense human striving to understand what, if anything, lies beyond the physical, is a confusing mess of conflicting religious claims.

So like I said in my previous post, science turns out to be more spiritual than religion. Science continually converges on a consensus about the nature of reality, while religion never does.

Why is this? The two most likely possibilities are (1) there's no metaphysical reality to be discovered, or (2) there is indeed a non-material side to existence, but it is absolutely ineffable – incapable of being described.

Since I want to live on after I die, naturally I hope the latter is true. But I'd put my bet on (1) as being more likely. Unfortunately, there's no way to win that bet and get a payoff. If I'm right, I won't be around to know it.

Science is more spiritual than religion

On this July 4, Independence Day in the United States, let's remember that the founders of this country wanted its citizens to be free of religious tyranny.

So you can bet they wouldn't be happy with the fundamentalist excesses in the United States today. Most of our founding fathers were deists who believed that religious beliefs have to be founded on reason, not holy books.

To them, God is revealed in the laws of nature, not religious superstition. Science thus becomes more godly than religion, because the nature of the creator is revealed through (no big surprise) nature.

Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's wife and collaborator, has written a nice essay about science, religion, wonder, awe, and her husband. She contrasts the ridiculous Christian fear of knowledge (Adam and Eve got punished for it) with the open-mindedness of science.

Our nation was founded on a heroic act of disobedience to a king who was presumed to rule by divine right. We created social and legal mechanisms to institutionalize the questioning of authority and the participation of every person in the decision-making process. It's the most original thing about us, our greatest contribution to global civilization.

Today, our not-exactly-elected officials try to make it seem as if questioning this ancient story [of Genesis] is wrong. . . . That the teaching of our evolving understanding of nature, which is a product of what we have been able to discover over generations, is somehow un-American or disrespectful of strongly held beliefs. As if we should not teach our children what we've learned about our origins, but rather we should continue to teach them this story which demonizes the best qualities of our founding fathers.

This makes no sense and it leads me to a question: Why do we separate the scientific, which is just a way of searching for truth, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe?

Science is nothing more than a never-ending search for truth. What could be more profoundly sacred than that? I'm sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment, will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality. So here's this process, this way, this mechanism for finding bits of reality. No single bit is sacred. But the search is.

Right on, Ms. Druyan. You echo the thoughts of New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, whose book ("The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science") I've just started reading.

I liked how Angier looks upon the question of whether the nature of the universe is objective or subjective. Many of the posts and comments on this Church of the Churchless blog address this perennial debate.

I'm much more inclined to an objective view of reality, because it is so self-evident. As I've noted before, the proof pops up every time we come to an intersection and find that people on the "green" side go and those on the "red" sign stop (with a few exceptions, which keep auto body repair shops in business).

But there's also an undeniable subjective side to human (and animal) consciousness. Some aspects of reality are ours alone, not capable of being shared with others as red and green traffic lights can. Emotions, for example.

Angier points us toward the unity that underlies both the objective and subjective sides of the universe. A coin has "heads" and "tails," but it is a single entity. To recognize only one side of the coin is to miss the entire picture that science tries to see.

Scientists accept, quite staunchly, that there is a reality capable of being understood, and understood in ways that can be shared with and agreed upon by others. We can call this "objective" reality if we like, as opposed to subjective reality, or opinion, or "whimsical set of predilections."

The contrast is deceptive, however, for it implies that the two are discrete entities with remarkably little in common. Objective reality is out there, other, impersonal, and "not me," while subjective reality is private, intimate, inimitable, and life as it is truly lived. Objective reality is cold and abstract; subjective reality is warm and Rockwell.

Science is effective because it bypasses such binaries in favor of what might be called empirical universalism, the rigorously outfitted and enormously fruitful premise that the objective reality of the universe comprises the subjective reality of every one of us. We are of the universe, and by studying the universe we ultimately turn the mirror on ourselves.

"Science is not describing a universe out there, and we're separate entities," said [physicist] Brian Greene. "We're part of that universe, we're made of the same stuff as that universe, of ingredients that behave according to the same laws as they do elsewhere in the universe."

That's beautiful. And deeply spiritual. There's only One, and we're part of it.

Salvation isn’t so serious to me anymore

Here's something curious (or, maybe not). Back in my fundamentalist days – yes, there's Eastern fundamentalism also – I was deeply concerned about my salvation.

I felt just like Woody Allen:

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

Yet now that I've evolved to a more open and non-dogmatic form of spirituality, I don't obsess nearly as much over whether I'll live on after I die. Or in what fashion my rebirth will occur, should that be in the cards for me.

So when I was nominally more religious, a true believer in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) branch of Sant Mat, I was seriously worried about what was going to happen to this ego-encapsulated being known as "Brian."

Yet isn't religiosity supposed to make you humble and egoless? I got to thinking about this after reading the July 2007 issue of the Western USA RSSB newsletter:

Sant Mat tells us…We have the opportunity to attain immortality…jivan mukhti, salvation before death.

Well, my first thought was "how can you be saved before you die?" I can see how you could believe you're saved from hellfire, rebirth, or whatever before your physical death.

However, until you actually die, that's just a hypothesis. Death is the ultimate spiritual experiment. It separates truth from falsehood cleanly, just like that!

My second thought was, "immortality sounds nice, but if it doesn't happen, that's OK too." As if I had a choice in the matter.

I was struck by how calmly I could accept precious little me being gone forever, imaginatively at least (hold a gun to my head and my reaction might be quite different).

Again, isn't this curious? Religious people fret over whether they're doing everything just right to ensure their personal salvation. This points to a Me-Me-Me mentality.

I know, because I once had it. And knew many others with the same "Thank god I'm saved, while others aren't" mentality.

That seems self-centered to me now. Plus, it doesn't show much faith in the goodness, justice, and harmony of the cosmos.

With my current Taoist sensibility, I'm pretty much content to accept that what will be, will be. I'm not looking for any special salvationary treatment.

On a Metolius river walk today, I came across a natural bridge that spanned the water.

Another stopped halfway. But the end of it displayed a burst of beauty.

I don't know which comes closest to being an analogy for what happens when we die. Do we fall into deep waters, never to rise again, or do we cross to another side?

Whichever, it seems to me that flowing along with whatever comes along is the best (and, really, only) course of action.